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The Advertising Research Handbook--Second Edition!
The Advertising Research Handbook, Second Edition, Charles E. Young
October, 2008
In this second edition of The Advertising Research Handbook, Charles Young expands his material to twenty chapters that represent four distinct and complementary views of the ever broadening landscape of ad research. Topics covered range from fresh news from the field of neuroscience to timeless insights that can help guide marketing and creative communities all the way from strategic development to creative execution.

Industry professionals who want to understand and implement the practice of advertising research in an effective way will find this book to be a useful tour guide and counsel that is easy to read and repeatedly reference. Its purpose is to be helpful in breaking down the often – and unnecessarily – complicated systems of ad research so that everyone can understand them and reap the benefits of speaking a common language.

Finally, those who read this book will find the proof to help educate their teams on why the use of a heuristic model rather than a black box system will improve their company’s quest for managing a brand’s communications in real time.

** Get your copy of the book by clicking on the Contact link (above right) and sending us an email.**
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Advertising Age-Letters to the editor: Agencies should be more involved with Researchers
Advertising Age, Charles E. Young
May 9, 2005
This piece challenges conventional research wisdom and addresses the role of negative emotions in advertising effectiveness.
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The Advertising Magnifier Effect: an MTV Study
Journal of Advertising Research
December 2006
The ARF defines engagement as "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." As experts in understanding how emotion works in advertising, we at Ameritest are most interested in learning more about what it means for the brand to be "enhanced by the surrounding context." This paper will present findings from a study of the MTV Music Awards that demonstrates under what conditions embedded advertising is helped by an engaging programming context.
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Aesthetic Emotion and Long-Term Ad Effects
Admap, Charles E. Young
April 2006, Issue 471
There is a lot of debate these days about the proper role of emotion in advertising effectiveness. This paper suggests that this debate is something of a red herring. This innovative research study of the advertising for a major brand from one of the world's largest packaged goods companies shows that the hardest working parts of a television commercial are those moments when the audience's thoughts and emotions come together.
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Ameritest FAQ
In this 18 page document of frequently asked questions, we cover the following items: Research procedure, questionnaire design, the report, using the information, theory, timeline, pricing, and contact information for Ameritest.
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Brain Waves, Picture Sorts®, and Branding Moments
Journal of Advertising Research, Chuck Young
July/August 2002
This paper describes a method to identify potential branding moments in television commercials. It involves the convergence between two fundamentally different nonverbal moment-by-moment measurement techniques. The first is a picture-sorting technique. The second is a brain-wave measurement.
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The BMW Internet Movies: From luxury car to movie star
Admap, Charles E. Young and Amy Shea Hall
April, 2007
Recent shifts in technology have prompted advertisers to explore new ways to reach the increasingly-elusive viewer. One new genre of advertising that has emerged, known as branded entertainment, attempts to integrate products into entertainment films. But do these films actually work as advertising? This paper presents the now-legendary BMW Internet Movies as a case study that illustrates how an understanding of story and its controlling idea is at the core of making successful branded entertainment.
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Brand Linkage and Advertising that Builds Brands
White Paper, Charles E. Young
This article on Brand Linkage covers: What is Brand Linkage? Why is Brand Linkage Important? How does Ameritest Measure Brand Linkage? The film, copy and music elements of an advertisement or What is the key to visual communication? Fitting and growing the brand and developing ownable brand equities. Semantic vs. esthetic information. Recognition vs. recall measurements.
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Capturing the Flow of Emotion in Television Commercials: A New Approach
The Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young
June 2004, Volume 44, NO. 2
This paper addresses the problem of how to measure the emotional content of TV commercials. Using A new measurement approach based on a moment-by-moment picture-sorting technique (Ameritest’s Flow of Emotion®.) Using this new technique, results based on an analysis of 120 commercials show how this new measure is a strong predictor of purchase intent, but not attention or recall. Conversely, the Ameritest Attention Flow measure explains commercial attention-getting power, as well as recall, but not purchase intent.
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Co-Creativity
Admap, Charles E. Young
January, 2008
This paper uses a new Ameritest Picture Sort, the Flow of Meaning, to explore the "motion" in emotion--showing how the change in emotion from the beginning to the end of an ad creates meaning for an audience. As you will see, new insights can be generated by modeling the emotional content of an ad in dynamic terms, as a series of "emotional transactions" that takes place between the commercial/director and the consumer/audience. This new approach to quantitative measurement links up with the latest findings from neuroscience about the role that mirror neurons play in our visual learning experience.
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Creative Awards vs. Copytesting
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles Young and Larry Cohen
April 2004, Volume XVIII Number 4
What does the fact that an ad won a major award show tell us about how that ad is likely to perform in research tests among consumers? And, as a corollary, what is it not telling us that may be critical to understanding the true potential of the ad to generate sales in the marketplace?
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Creative Differences between Copywriters and Art Directors
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young
May/June 2000, Volume 40., No. 3
This paper reports findings from a telephone study conducted among agency art directors and copywriters about their attitudes and beliefs about television commercials. The study finds significant differences between these two groups. The results of this study suggest the need for more balanced methods of advertising measurement which can give full weight to the visual power of television advertising.
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Delivering The Message
Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, Chuck Young
November 2004
This article was published in the November edition of the Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. Chuck Young discusses the importance of going beyond verbally derived advertising research measures. In a culture like Japan, where a large proportion of communication is non-verbal, this is especially important.
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Does day-after recall testing produce vanilla advertising?
AdMap, Chuck Young, John Kastenholz and Graham Kerr
June 2004
This paper demonstrates why Recall lacks the ability to effectively measure emotional advertising. Insights into these different performance measures and correlations with other diagnostics are demonstrated.
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Emotion in TV Ads
Admap, Charles E. Young and John Kastenholz
January 2004
Good storytelling, which unites ideas with emotions, lies at the heart of advertising effectiveness. In our pre-testing work, we have identified four types of emotional organization or dramatic structures which, in general, are found in effective commercials.
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The Eye is Not a Camera
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2003
It’s a simple memory test that reminds us that the human mind stores memories in more than one way. For advertising researchers, it triggers the debate about the relative merits of recognition vs. recall as a measure of advertising awareness. It is sometimes higher by as much as a factor of two! Which measure should you believe?
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Fast editing speed and commercial performance
Admap, Charles Young
May 2007
Contemporary advertising has many jobs. It must break through the clutter, be well branded and motivate. It must also pack meaningful, memorable experiences into as short a space as possible. So how does the pace of a commercial affect the ads performance? This paper discusses how the visual complexity and editing speed can impart the effect advertising has on viewers.
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Fast-Working Advertising
Admap, Charles E. Young
June 2007
Subjective time, as opposed to clock time, is what we experience when watching a movie. This paper explains why the frame of reference for measuring cognitive and emotional response to advertising with the Ameritest Picture Sorts is subjective time—which makes it fundamentally different than the clock-based methods involving dial meters. An analysis of a large database of ads shows that audiences experience time going faster for television commercials that are more attention getting and more motivating.
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A Film Director's Guide to Ad Effectiveness
Admap, Charles E. Young
Sept. 2003
Understanding the contribution of the filmmaker's art to advertising effectiveness. An audience doesn't just watch a movie. An audience participates in a movie by choosing to focus more on some things than on other things in the film. Taking this visual "language" from the film to probe an audience's participation in the film can provide very powerful insights into how commercials connect with the mind and heart of consumers.
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Finding Ideas That Travel: Effective Global Brand Advertising
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
November 2003
Advertising that is developed in country may have a home-court advantage in terms of how it scores on measures of performance. The challenge of managing international advertising is to make the correct trade-offs between in-country efficiency versus cross-country efficiency.
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Finding The Creative Edge: Research as Flow
Admap, Charles Young
December 2006
Creatives understand intuitively that one of the riskiest strategies is not to take any creative risks. However, it is a balancing act. The most effective advertising stretches the meaning of the brand in the mind of the consumer, but not too far. In this article Chuck Young explains that advertising research does not lead to safe, predictable advertising but can actually provide the courage and freedom to take risks.
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Five Strategies for Improving Advertising Productivity
Admap magazine, Charles E. Young
February 2005
When developing advertising, most members of the ad team are sensitive to the importance of identifying the most effective creative strategy. But what is overlooked is the importance of using the right Learning Strategy for getting the value out of the research process. This papers reviews the 5 distinct learning strategies used by Unilever and Ameritest to develop effective advertising.
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Focus and Fit: Advertising and branding join forces to create a star.
Marketing Research Magazine, Charles E. Young, John Kastenholz, and Graham Kerr
Spring 2004
This paper examines how the construct of branding has been measured by three major pre-testing systems—Ipsos-ASI, Millward Brown’s Preview, and Ameritest—for a large number of commercials produced by Unilever.
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High Touch vs High-Tech: Can you test print ads on the internet?
Qurik's marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2002
The internet beckons advertising researchers with the promise of a cheaper and faster way of putting advertising--as research stimulus--in front of the eyeballs of consumers. But what happens to the validity of the research when the tactile experience of reading an ad in the context of a physical magazine is transported to cyberspace?
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How Consumer React to New-Product Ads
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles Young, David Olson, Mary Jane Schlinger
June/July 1982 Vol. 22, No. 3
Why do people react differently to commercials for new brands versus those for mature, ongoing brands? The reason for undertaking the research was to identify differences that would offer clues to developing more effective new-product advertising--both in terms of strategy and execution.
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How to Measure Creative Performance in a Fast-Paced World of Advertising
Charles E. Young
This paper introduces a new approach to advertising tracking, which provides real time performance rankings + diagnostic reasons why for all the advertising creative running in a category. Using the highly competitive world of fast food TV advertising as an example, the paper shows how knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of your competitor’s advertising is important for explaining the impact of your own advertising on your brands sales. For validation, the paper describes a simple advertising model of McDonald’s sales results, based on public sales figures reported to Wall Street.
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Is QSR advertising a good value?
Charles E. Young
If the marketing managers of fast food restaurants had the same quality control standards for their food as their advertising, one out of three meals would leave a bad taste in the customers’ mouth.
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Integrated Testing for Integrated Marketing: One size almost fits all
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
April, 2006
In this paper Ameritest shows you how to integrate your research measurements across different media platforms by systematically building a coherent set of measurement models. The paper describes the similarities and differences between television, radio, print, outdoor, direct response, package design and internet advertising.
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A Little Pride goes a Long Way--Dominic Carter of Ameritest Explains Why
Aug 18-31, VOl. 03 No. 16
This short article describes how the Ameritest system is being used by Japanese advertising for “high image” ad campaigns.
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Minding Music and Movies
Admap, Charles E. Young
May, 2008
Music has a huge role to play in the effectives of television advertising or web videos. At a fundamental level, music and moving pictures both represent information encoded in time. This paper discusses some of the findings of modern neuroscience, and uses data from the Flow of Attention and Flow of Emotion in an experiment with Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to discuss how music and moving visuals interact to shape our emotional response to advertising film.
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Multi-Platforming Engagement
Admap, Charles E. Young and Amy Shea Hall
October, 2007
For those who depend on advertising to fund the creation of content—namely television networks—exploring exactly what it means to call an audience “engaged,” and exactly what happens when it happens, is vital. This article presents a rare case study of how an audience’s engagement with programming impacts the embedded advertising.
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New Product Launch
Looking backstage at a successful new product launch. 1996 David Ogilvy Silver Medallion Winner L'eggs Smooth Silhouettes from Sara Lee Hosiery.
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One Size Fits All: A global model for diagnostic pre-testing of TV commercials
ESOMAR Rome Conference 2001 CD, Charles E. Young
2001
This paper describes the international validation of a heuristic model for pre-testing TV commercials. The validation is based on the model's internal measures rather than external comparisons such as pre-and post-test validations.
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Pick Your Peaks: How to improve the accuracy of Internet ad tracking
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
July/August 2005
As more and more advertisers move their advertising tracking research to the internet, a common technique is to use a few frames from a television commercial to obtain a recognition-based advertising awareness score. But Ameritest has shown repeatedly that not all the images in a commercial are equally well recalled. This research shows the danger inherent in choosing the wrong images for the advertising stimulus--if you get it wrong you can understand you're true ad awareness by up to forty percent!
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Picture Sorts vs. Emotion Trace
White Paper, Charles E. Young
Both Ameritest and Millward Brown have developed moment-by-moment techniques for measuring emotional engagement with television commercials. This short paper compares the two approaches.
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Prescription for Testing Multi-Page Print Ads Online
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
January 2005
Monitoring prescription drug advertising can be challenging. Finding the target audience can be expensive and time-consuming. The message content of the advertising can be complex, often requiring multiple pages of explanation and proofs of performance. Powerful research diagnostic instruments, which are essential for pinpointing areas of an ad that require creative treatment, are critical. Ameritest has found an “online cure” for these ills that is cheaper and quicker than the offline approach, and provides diagnostic insights on how viewers process print ads.
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Print Brochure
Ameritest's Print Ad Research White Paper
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Researchers and creatives: a meeting of minds?
Admap magazine, Charles E. Young
June 2005
To use research effectively in the advertising development process, it's not enough to just do good research--you must also know how to communicate research results to the ad team, particularly Creatives whose work is being evaluated. This paper discusses the factors that contribute to successful--and unsuccessful--research meetings, with an emphasis on understanding how to deal with the emotions generated in this highly sensitive area.
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"Roughing It" Rehearse Your Creative Ideas in Rough Production to Optimize Ad Effectiveness
Marketing Research Magazine, Charles E. Young, Tony Dubitsky and John Kastenholz
Winter 2004
Results from advertising pre-testing research described here show that initially “rehearsing” your executions in rough form can enhance the breakthrough and branding power of your finished film ads, if attention is paid to diagnostic insights provided by the pre-test. Several case studies are also included that demonstrate how insights from “rough rehearsals” were used to enhance animatics that were subsequently produced as film commercials.
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The Relation Between Brand Name Linguistic Characteristics and Brand Name Memory
The Journal of Advertising, Tina M. Lowrey, L. J. Shrum and Tony M. Dubitsky
Fall 2003 Vol 32 No 3
Copytesting results were used to assess the relationship between linguistic features in brand names and memory for those names. Regression analyses revealed that three linguistic variables were positively related to brand name memory but only for less familiar brands.
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Researcher as Teacher: A heuristic model for pre-testing TV commercials
Quirks Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2001
A researcher has two jobs: first, to learn something useful that your clients didn’t know before; second, to teach them what you found out. The second job is the harder of the two. It is also the more important, because it is the key to making sure that the research you do actually makes your clients smarter and gets used.
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Semantic Networks: How to construct unique selling propositions for your brand's advertising
Charles E. Young
Persuasion is a about making new connections in the mind of the consumer. This paper describes a new tool for identifying the selling paths in the mind of the consumer that can be used to construct Unique Selling Propositions for your brand.
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A Short History of Television Copytesting
Charles. E. Young
This paper traces the evolution of the copytesting industry in the US from the late 1950’s onward to the present time by exploring four key themes: the quest for evaluative “report card” measures, the development of diagnostic measures, the development of nonverbal measures, and the development of moment-by-moment measures. In closing, seven trends are described that will shape the future of the copytesting industry.
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Single-Number Decision Making
White Paper, Charles E. Young
A disciplined focus on report card performance of advertising can raise or lower the floor of advertising performance, only an emphasis on learning and understanding can result a performance growth curve. The Ameritest point of view is that advertising research should be used as a learning system, not just a report card, and as part of a business process of continuous quality improvement.
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Tags are it! (The Four Types of Brand Memories)
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
June 2007
For an ad to enhance brand equity it must deliver ideas, images and emotions in such a way that they are stored in our long term memory. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising we must first understand how these memories are organized. This paper introduces three types of memory systems: Action, Emotion and Knowledge. Different images from an ad go into these three different memory systems combined with a fourth, Brand Identity, to make up a set of brand "tags" that can be applied as we examine how advertising creates meaning and memory in the mind of the consumer.
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Test Drive a Car Catalog-Emotion in Motion
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
October 2008
This paper shows how the Picture Sorts technique can be used to measure how consumers search through the visuals in a catalog. In the ten car catalogs used as an example, each image is measured in terms of its attention-getting power and emotional impact. We then classify visuals into one of four categories based on the point of view represented by the photograph-—e.g. the driver’s experience versus the passenger experience—-and analyze the emotional contribution each type of imagery makes to the overall brand image.
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The Time Shifters' Mind
Charles E. Young
"Time flies when you're having fun." This familiar concept, interestingly, applies to advertising as well as to life experiences. This paper explores the idea of subjective time and how it applies to advertising film. It will also present some new tools for creating fully integrated, fast-working advertising campaigns.
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TV Brochure
The Total Television Research Experience. White Paper.
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The Use of Negative Emotions in Advertising
Admap, Charles E. Young
October 2006
Harnessing negative emotions can drive engagement with your advertising and create positive results. This paper discusses the emotional archetype involved in effective use of negative emotion and helps you distinguish intended from unintended negative emotional response to your ads.
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Video Rhythms and Recall
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young and Michael Robinson
June/July 1989, Vol. 29, No. 3
In this article the authors present a view of television advertising that analyzes commercial content in terms of the rhythmic structure of video. The Picture Sorts technique provides us with an operational tool for tracking how consumers follow the frame-by-frame flow of commercial images.
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Virtual Consumption
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
April, 2005, Volume XIX Number 4
This paper explores the role of “false memories” and the “mental rehearsal of the consumption process” as one of the mechanisms by which advertising builds brands in the food and beverage categories.
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Visual Connectedness and Persuasion
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young, Michael Robinson
March/April 1992 Vol. 32, No. 2
This article shows how the Ameritest Picture Sorts technique explores the differences between persuasive and nonpersuasive TV commercials.
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Visual Experience of New and Established Product Commercials
Charles E. Young and Michael Robinson
This study uses a moment-by-moment copytesting technique to examine the differences between new product and established brand TV commercials from an information theory perspective.
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Visual Language of Global Branding
Admap Magazine (WARC), Charles E. Young
April 2003
What is one of the biggest barriers to building a global brand? The limitations of language. However, there is a solution—and it lies in understanding how consumers around the world cognitively process and respond to visuals.
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What is the "information" in an ad?
Admap, Charles E. Young
November, 2007
Each of our five senses contains information that cannot be translated into the other four senses—smell has a language all its own that is incomparably different from the language of touch, or sound, or sight. The language of advertising film conveys emotional truth to our eyes that our ears cannot completely understand. Pictures are not the same as words. To create effective advertising we need both.
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When to introduce the brand
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
April, 2008
This paper shows how the creative choice which is made to use one of four dramatic archetypes of emotional advertising determines the right time to introduce the brand. It also explains how the Flow of Emotion method can be used to verify that the creative has the timing of the brand introduction exactly right, or how to fix the problem if bad timing is causing a weakness in the brand linkage of your advertising.
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Why TV Spot Length Matters
Admap, Charles E. Young
September 2008
This paper explores the issue of how TV advertising performance varies as a function of the length of the ad. For example, a fifteen second cut-down of a thirty second commercial has, on average, 80% of the attention-getting power of the longer piece of film. The paper also discusses a theoretical argument for why longer might be better, based on the different kinds of emotion-charged brand imagery from commercials that are stored in different memory systems of the mind than those accessed by traditional recall methods.
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